Habits

After a recent conversation with a family member I was a little disappointed with myself, with what seemed to me to be a lack of compassion for the person on the other end of the telephone, with the way I was quick to being annoyed or frustrated with the things I was hearing.
I fell into an old familiar attitude with this person I have known all my life.  I stopped hearing what was being said, stopped trying to understand the place of this person and instead went straight to old assumptions and attitudes about what was going on.

It is a hard thing not to do with people who we think we know so well, or have been around for so long.  We believe we have seen all these scenarios before, and understand the motivations behind them.  We recognize reoccurring themes and patterns of disfunction and fail to really listen or look at what is going on right now with them.

If I felt as though I were being treated this way I would end the conversation quickly and feel a bit offended.  I would not appreciate that I was not being seen in real time, as a living growing and changing person, but instead was given only a superficial recognition of who I am or what I was going thru, or how I may have changed and grown.

In my rereading of "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" by Sogyal Rinpoche, I came to the section on Dying.  In it Sogyal Rinpoche writes about how one might relate to the dying, their real needs and the considerations of what it is that they might be going thru.  The insight is and need of compassion seems most important at this time.

I consider the idea of living a good and happy life, fulfilling and full of love, but then ending it in a drawn out fear filled, suffering and painful way and this affirms to me the need of true compassion by those attending the dying.  Would ending ones life in such a suffering and frightened way diminish the significance of the happiness of the life lived?

While I was reading that section of the book, I had in the back of my mind the trouble I'd felt with myself after getting off the telephone with my loved one.  I had a thought.  Aren't we all dying?  Aren't we all on a trip of unknown duration thru this life toward it's end?  If we look down our individual paths in this life, don't they all converge at this same spot, end in this same place?


If this is so, then don't all people deserve to be treated with the same level of compassion, all of the time.  For who of us can know that  we will be here tomorrow, really, or tonight, or 5 minutes from now?

Those who are facing there end in this life can be frightened, angry and can act out in ways that don't seem to make sense, or direct that anger at people who seem underserving.

Well, this is all of us isn't it?

If I go about treating all people with the respect, dignity, and compassion that I would if they had just been informed that they were about to die from a serious illness, then I might be a little bit closer to treating people the way I'd like to treat them all of the time anyway.  It is a way I'd like to be treated, with honesty, dignity, compassion, love.

We are, each of us, facing the same end of this life, with just about the same information as to what it all means, what happens next, with the same basic questions that cannot be answered.

We have great halls of learning and education that focus on all the different disciplines we might undertake while in this life, but we seem to have so little in the way of education on the matters that are common to each of us, and that truly make us all who we are, human, thinking feeling beings, with some very common challenges.